ancient cities

Technology, where he taught for more than 30
years. By all reckoning, he was a leading thinker
in the field of city planning and design. His work
inspired many researchers, practitioners, and students
in his field and influenced academic thinking
and writing in areas outside planning. His
name is most commonly associated with his seminal
work, The Image of the City. First published
in 1960, the book has gone through multiple
printings. It has been translated into many different
languages and is widely read and consulted in
academic work and practice.
Image Studies
In contrast to the prevalent Beaux-Arts and modernist
traditions of city design, Lynch was committed
to defining a new practice of design that
would be informed by the human experiences of
the built environment. By asking people to draw
maps of their cities, and to tell what came to their
mind first when they thought of their city, or to
describe what the experience of the city meant to
them and how that affected their sense of wellbeing,
Lynch demonstrated how it is possible to
construct a collective or consensus image of the
city. This “public image”—as he preferred to call
it—consists of a collection of the physical features
of the city that consistently appear in individual
mental maps of the city: certain streets, significant
buildings, functional districts, important public
spaces, concentration and intensity of activities,
major streets and roads commonly traveled, natural
elements like rivers and hills, and so on. He
suggested that such frequently mentioned elements
shown in individual maps or included in the
aggregated public image can be categorized as
districts, edges, landmarks, nodes, and paths,
although the respondents may not consciously use
such rubrics. These concepts, however, are now
routinely used in the practice of urban design.
Lynch argued further that some cities are more
“imageable” than others, and this depends on the
legibility of the urban form. What makes a city
more or less legible? It is a function of three
things, he proposed: identity, structure, and
meaning. Cities that have buildings and natural
features with strong identities, street patterns that
are easy to comprehend, and other form elements
that have functional and symbolic meanings are
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likely to be more imageable than cities lacking
such attributes.
Considered a seminal work, The Image of the
City inspired both practice and pedagogy of city
planning and design, on the one hand, and scholarly
research on the other. Many urban design
projects in U.S. cities to this day begin with an
imageability study in an effort to understand how
the form of a city is perceived by lay citizens and
whether that conforms to the planners’ own
understanding and intuitions of the significant
features of the city. But his theoretical insights
about imageability—that is, identity, structure,
and meaning, which would seem to have more
relevance to city design policies—did not seem to
take deep roots in the world of practice. Instead,
the taxonomy he proposed for describing city
image—districts, edges, landmarks, nodes, and
paths—became a popular methodological tool for
analyzing the visual form of cities.
The contribution of the image studies toward
the formulation of urban design policies and
guidelines, however, has been uneven, and Lynch
himself expressed some disappointment in retrospect.
Nevertheless, the methodology has become
a popular pedagogic tool in many urban design
studios. It is a common practice for instructors to
ask students to do a “Lynch map” of the city or
neighborhood they are studying. This methodology
has proved an effective learning exercise in
making the students aware of the visual form of
the physical city.
In academia, Lynch’s work inspired a whole
new research paradigm that made human–environment
relations and interactions integral to
urban design. It paved the way for a host of cognitive
mapping studies—a term that was taken from
the title of an earlier article by psychologist Edward
Tolman in 1948—by environmental psychologists,
geographers, sociologists, and planning academics.
Lynch himself never used the term, nor is he
believed to have been aware of Tolman’s work.
Nevertheless, the gaggle of research that followed
covered a broad spectrum of inquiry.
Many of these studies explored the differences
in the images or mental maps—a term favored by
geographers—of the same urban area by age, stage
of life cycle, class, gender, location, and even occupation.
Others examined the styles of representation
and the developmental aspects of mental